Memories of Mr. Benson

My first writing teacher was Mr. Benson, a former Marine, at Theodore Herbert Middle School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Benson had a high forehead and crew-cut hair, plus a good selection of striped, club ties. He wore starched, button-down shirts of various yuppie shades, West Point-creased trousers, and wing-tip shoes. He was linebacker wide and what I would call halfway tall, was a scratch golfer, and wore a clunky class ring. He resembled not so much an English teacher of white, middle class teenagers as a drill instructor forced to dress up for an unwanted business presentation. He read us Hemingway, made us read Hemingway, assigned us to write a one-paragraph pastiche of Hemingway’s style, then made us rewrite that paragraph and rewrite it again before moving on to read and mimic other writers and, eventually, write a short story. A stickler for grammar, a stickler for spelling, a stickler for handing things in on time, he wrote his comments in the margins in feathery, almost unreadably light pencil. He was spare in his criticisms—”Too many adjectives”—and spare in his praise. If you wrote a truly wonderful paragraph, he wrote, “You made your point.” He was demanding, fair, once in a while funny in a corny, parental way The incongruence of a Marine teaching creative writing was not lost on us and added to an allure founded on a legend that he’d once decked a kid who talked back to him. In one of my braver moments, after I’d written a decent paragraph, I asked if the story was true. Mr. Benson sat on the corner of his desk, folded his arms over that well-starched shirt and still-firm chest, gave me one of those macho man looks, how a toreador might regard a bull he didn’t respect, and nodded slightly, that slightness meaning to convey that he’d do it again if he needed to, even to pretty Gina Campoli if she deserved it, a manner which reminded me of what Ahab once said to the crew of the Pequod, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

I left middle school for high school and never ran into a good writing teacher again until my second year in college—and maybe I’ll write about David Huddle next week. But many years later, many many in fact, after I graduated from Bennington College, enlisted in the Peace Corps, did my stint in yeshiva, in my father’s Kay-Bee business, after I was already married, had a couple of kids, and moved to Israel, I was lucky enough to get my first novel published—-and how can you call getting published anything but some name of Providence?—by Walker Company, now a division of Random House. And when that summer following the publication, my parents threw a signing party at the local book store in Lenox, Massachusetts, I looked up Mr. Benson’s number in the Pittsfield phone book. I called him up and invited him to the party. He showed up in golfing cap and clothes, Scottish-looking, like he’d just strode in from the links at St. Andrews. He was trimmer than I remembered him, with a cherubic pink on his cheeks. I autographed a copy of A Good, Protected Life and showed him in the Acknowledgments where I mentioned his name. He shook my hand enthusiastically as I said thanks for the great teaching those many years ago. And I heard from my mother via a friend of hers who was a guidance counselor at the middle school and witnessed this, that Mr. Benson took the book to the teacher’s room and held it up to everyone and said, “Sometimes it’s worth it.”